


destruction of the father / reconstruction of the father

by grenadier (5H4E)



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening
Genre: Gen, as per: writing practise
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-11
Packaged: 2021-03-13 10:42:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29277156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/5H4E/pseuds/grenadier
Summary: “Are all elves so interested in the history of men?”Kallian’s lips quirk. The wine has flushed her cheeks, and stained her mouth. There is an urge, some small gentle paternal instinct; from the part of him he trusts the most, his fatherhood; to take her drink from her. It’s because she’s blonde, he thinks, grimly. Like Anora.“Everybody knows the story of the Battle of the River Dane,” she says. “But, no, they aren’t. My mother served in the Night Elves company during the rebellion,” she puts down her bowl, and stares into the thicket of trees ahead of them. “She talked of you often.”on fatherhood, grief, and a world at war.
Kudos: 4





	1. one

Loghain doesn’t remember the Joining.

He remembers Anora. Her black-and-gold heraldic bliaut (a mabari for the Theirins sewn onto her right, and the Mac Tir dracolisk embroidered in greenish-silver on her left. Her ermine tippers. Her kirtle, with fat hanging tear-shaped pearls (a gift from her mother). Her coronet, with silverwork, diamonds and emeralds all bright and gleaming (a gift from Cailan). He remembers his daughter – with tears in her eyes, in spite of everything, even when her expression remained diplomatically impassive – and the moments when her voice had wobbled: he remembers her, six years old, with skinned knees, with ribbons in her hair. He remembers Kallian and her armour, a griffon blazoned across her chest. He remembers memories that are not his – of the Black City, of a dragon and its teeth, of a song still ringing in his head.

The taste of blood is still in his mouth. He feels woozy.

He wants desperately to lie down, to curl up somewhere warm and pass into blissful unknowingness. He feels already dead. He can’t die yet. Anora won’t allow it. He thinks, if he had died in the Joining, she would probably have marched into the Fade after him to scold him for dereliction of duty – as general, or Warden, or as father, or all three. He thinks, if he had died in the Joining, he would not be able to see his daughter through to her coronation.

Above him, the Warden, bright blonde hair catching the torchlight.

“Promise me you’ll be true to your word, and secure Anora on her throne,” he manages. His teeth feel loose, his throat burning. It does not escape him, for a moment, that he has been reduced to begging. “I didn’t do all I’ve done for her to lose her kingdom,”

He doesn’t know what he expects her to say – something triumphant and gloating, like ‘it is my kingdom to give’, perhaps?

She barely reacts. “Help me keep a kingdom to give her,” she says. He barely hears.

He feels woozy; he feels like he’s going to collapse. He rises, and doesn’t.


	2. two

They make camp by a winding brook that streaks cold water from the Frostbacks over silver stones, and Loghain can’t help but think of years ago when his knees did not ache, and he had answered to his father, in the foggy fields of his memories – a young rebel not yet strong enough to lift a sword, making camp in the shadows of mountains, living off bartered bread and cheese, nerves alight, counting the stars and constellations at night on watch. When he looks up, he sees _Draconix_ twinkling through sparse clouds, and remembers a past life; an outlaw on the run from the Orlesians.

He’s not running now, and he answers to an elf, pink-cheeked with youth.

Kallian sits by him at the fireside, hair damp from the rivulet. She’s discarded her armour and leathers for a human’s pair of hose, and a shirt much too big for her if not for the thick belt. She’s taken to decorating it with blackwork, he’s noticed. There’s black acanthus leaves winding up her arms.

“Was there much of this,” she starts, suddenly, staring into the bowl she’s using in place of a goblet, into the red of the poor wine in stolen dusted bottles stolen from long forgotten cellars in old keeps, “during the occupation?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Making camp, hunting. It’s not the same as large military camps – or reigning as king presumptive,”

“Nor life in the alienage, I would imagine,” he replies.

Her lips purse, just for a second, before she catches herself, and returns to polite impassivity and silence. He’s used to silence; good at it, in fact.

The rest of her band have seldom spoken to him, save the Crow to curl his lips over his teeth to pronounce his failure to assassinate their shared leader. Mostly, he’s shared his company with the mabari – Daveth, he learns, is his name.

(“Named after a dead Grey Warden,” Wynne, the shrivelled old Circle Mage, (– an _abomination,_ he’d been spitefully smug to learn –) had sneered, lightly, when he asked.

“Well,” he’d said, unable to help himself – or, perhaps, unwilling to disallow himself this one jab, “with the bastard gone, I suppose we can, at least, credit _both_ Tabris and I, now, with the rank of Warden-killer.”)

And so. There’s a pause. The fire pops and spits, gnarled and blackened wood glowing orange and white from where they’d cooked their supper – roe. It had given Loghain no small amount of satisfaction to think that, technically, they are poaching on Eamon’s lands – although, he remembers, technically, Wardens can take what they want. The penalty for poaching is as light as having one’s hands cut off, as heavy as being hanged. Only, not for people like him, not anymore. He wonders if Kallian thinks about these things.

For a moment, he’s left alone with his thoughts, absent-mindedly prodding at the embers with a stick.

“You’re right,” she replies, calmly, coolly, “and I suspect life in the alienage will be very different to what awaits the elves snatched by the Tevinters you allowed in.” She smiles, lips stretched over her teeth. She has a sweet smile. He thinks, sometimes, when she is left on watch and he to his tent, that she will kill him in his sleep. “But thank the Maker the borders were kept safe from outsiders,”

He’s well acquainted with her soft-spoken form of passive-aggressive barbs, and he knows bait when he sees it. He refuses to bite. He won’t be sucked into another politely worded debate about his own monstrosity.

The fire wood pops, the fire light flickering. “Mm,” he sniffs. “No, it was not like this during the occupation.” The hunting, the hunger, _that_ is familiar; the smell of ash and dirt, the dirt under his nails. The singing dragon-dreams are new; Kallian’s cold eyes are new. It’s quieter this time; he misses the sound of Maric’s laughter.

“What _was_ it like?” (In spite of everything, he doesn’t miss the impatience that creeps into Kallian’s tone, and he thinks – _Maker, she is young_.)

He remembers himself in his early twenties, bone-tired, and fired on little more than conviction. Maker, _he_ was young. He thinks of Kallian, younger still – he doesn’t know how old she is exactly. Sixteen? Seventeen? Nor does he know what conviction she has to keep her going – apocalypses do not carry idealism with them.

“Are all elves so interested in the history of men?”

Kallian’s lips quirk. The wine has flushed her cheeks, and stained her mouth. There is an urge, some small gentle paternal instinct; from the part of him he trusts the most, his fatherhood; to take her drink from her. _It’s because she’s blonde_ , he thinks, grimly. _Like Anora._

“ _Everybody_ knows the story of the Battle of the River Dane,” she says. “But, no, they aren’t. My mother served in the Night Elves company during the rebellion,” she puts down her bowl, and stares into the thicket of trees ahead of them. “She talked of you often.”

Loghain thinks, the occupation’s ghosts have come back to haunt him. Loghain asks, “what’s her name?”

He doesn’t think he’ll remember – what is one elf in a sea of white glinting eyes in the dark? Once the war was won many of the elves he had served alongside had withdrawn from Maric’s court, back to their alienages and hovels, or fled to the Dalish for some respite under dappled, leafy shades after the conflict had ruined their hands, their eyes, their ears. The rest had not lived to see that part.

Kallian narrows her eyes for a moment, looks all flinty, before catching herself. “Adaia,” she offers it up hesitantly, as if presenting a wounded bird to a dog. He realises, belatedly: she is a child missing her mother.

Loghain dredges up old memories like a ship’s anchor, past all the reminders of Anora crying the first time she travelled with him from Gwaren, from her mother, to Denerim; of the expensive funeral held for Celia, where Chantry singers had lit candles, led prayers, and sang hymns. Celia had been the palliative after the occupation, after a life on the run, when his fingers had bled for sores from his bow. Here again, under the stars, under _Draconix_ and an obligation to his nation, recalling the glowing-eyed faces of his Night Elves, it feels like he has to rebury her.

But Kallian is a child missing her mother, so an exhumation of ghosts it is. Dust and cobwebs and nightmares and all.

Adaia. He remembers an Adaia. She had been one of the first to volunteer, he thinks. She had called him ‘ _shem’_ and ‘bastard’ and many other things, but she was good with knives, and wanted to make the Orlesians hurt. He had scouted out alienages, all dowdy in his drab leather gambeson, but she had marched up to him nevertheless, furrowed brows and furious eyes, and hissed “it’s not safe for you to be here, shem.”

When he had offered her revenge, or, perhaps, a purpose and sense of control, she had offered her efforts eagerly. She had been one of the elves to travel to alienages and brothels and the poor districts outside city walls, recruiting elves seeking liberation – in some cases, from unhappy homes or marriages – or the ephemeral ‘something better’. In his youth, he had imagined some of them had volunteered out of patriotism. Now, he is not so sure.

In exchange, he had trained her with a bow. He’d watched her shoot her first Orlesian.

In the quieter times, she had spoken a lot about wishing to have children.

A hundred years in the future, Kallian’s voice cuts through his thoughts. “You remember her?” She says it more like a statement, but there is still some scepticism in her voice.

“Yes,” he says.

Adaia’s face is fogged by age in his memories, but he remembers her well enough, he supposes. The colour of her skin, her hair. For a ghost, she appears a lot less like one of the images in his psalters – a whisper of a corporeal form, a spirit shrouded in white silks, barely there. It is… difficult to believe Kallian is Adaia’s daughter. From her fair colouring, pale and milky, to the smooth, pointed tone to her voice. She is like one of his daughter’s hairpins or needles – elegant and sharp.

“I don’t know whether it will please you or not to hear that she was not one of the elves you sold into slavery,” she quipped, bringing it up so calmly that it almost sounded like she was joking.

Adaia would probably have roared it.

Loghain drank deeply from his goblet, not tasting it. Kallian was watching him, he knew, and he was resolved to give her nothing. He feels tired – he feels _old_.

“Does she still play the pipes?” He asks, instead. Little wooden things. A recorder, or a flute. She had played them to raise the morale of her elven band some nights, over bitter tasting ale. He thinks she may have crafted them herself, if he remembers correctly.

Kallian’s face is back to blank again. All nothingness, like she’s mulling over something as simple as which shoe to put on first.

“She died a few years ago. Killed by humans, for defending another elf,” she meets his eyes, she refuses to look away. And then, distantly, he sees something soften, in her. “But I had forgotten that she played the pipes.”


End file.
